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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30997 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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I woke up to Trump pulling a plug on the Department of Education. There's the usual freakout because this makes great headlines, there's the usual handwaving from the WH about how the programs people actually care about will get renamed and shoveled somewhere else, and Trump's enemies become further entrenched.

In principle this is similar to a lot of his other actions: it's motivated by the belief that Americans are getting a raw deal (they are), that they are paying too much and spending the money ineffectively (the money is not resulting in better educational achievement), and the looming giant specter that the government is heavily debt laden and going to go broke if you are not a subscriber to some wonkery like MMT. Trump is using the full power of the executive to chainsaw away the federal bloat and return power and responsibility back to the states.

What Trump likely hasn't foreseen is the likely response to this. I consider the Incentive Problem at the Heart of the American Justice System one of the most important articles written about America in the last decade. It's worth reading in its entirety; but the tldr is something like this: the tension between spending their own money and other people's money has created the disaster that is modern American policing, sentencing, judging and confinement. States don't want to pay for the operation of their own prisons at the same time they want to spend less on policing, so they'd rather give it up to for-profit prisons or shove it off to federal responsibility while enacting a weird kind of anarcho-tyranny.

This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders. They will make a complete hash of it: "Brexit means Brexit" - never in a million years did the people expect that this would fail to move the needle on any of the reasons they voted for it (immigration, economics) or the complete lack of a plan for delivering it, as if the organs of government were rebelling against being told to perform their jobs for the first time in years and immediately set about trying to sabotage the mandated accomplishment with malicious compliance (you voted for Brexit because you hate immigrants, let's get even more of them in the country).

I believed, and still do, think Trump is a better president for America than Harris and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming. Better yet, the loony side of Team Blue decisively lost in politics, and "demographics are destiny" has been proven false again. Maybe there's a chance they'll learn something before the pendulum swings back again.

However, there stands a very real chance of complete disaster across America as people who have never had to make a real decision in their lives find themselves suddenly having to as the Fed washes its hands and trims budgets. Not to mention the state employees who suddenly have to find room in the budget for all the things the federal government previously took care of. State governments are as subject to the same socialization of losses and the privatization of profits as the Fed is, and just as vulnerable to grifters, lawyers, and all manner of incompetent bureaucrats.

Before team red stans /ourguy/ some more, I would urge you to reconsider - do you have a good opinion of the people working in your state's government, and do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?

I guess we're talking about state's rights here and it reminded me that by finally settling Roe v Wade and forcing it to the states, not only have we found most states are able to find a position fairly quickly (and I'd guess more favorable to the left overall) but it has completely annihilated it as a presidential campaign issue. I would expect that Education now moves off the table as something a candidate can run on...

UNLESS...people can tally the cost. This is hard because the data that tells us how schools are doing comes from Dept of ED and now those reports will just be gone. Or perhaps haphazardly and randomly tabulated by the states. Another pseudo-metric washed away into the swill bucket with CPI, Jobless claims and GDP.

The good news is that you won't even know if it fails.

do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?

In the field of grade school literacy, Mississippi jumped from the very bottom to top 10 over the last 10 years, entirely due to their state government taking the responsibility of educating their children into their own hands. I'd be very interested to hear the arguments from people insistent their state can't be expected to educate their children as well as Mississippi does.

Mississippi jumped from the very bottom to top 10 over the last 10 years, entirely due to their state government taking the responsibility of educating their children into their own hands.

A big part of the Mississippi jump in scores was mandating (in 2013) that students in third grade repeat the year if they are not reading and mathing at grade level. The federal assessment tests are in fourth grade, so fourth grade reading and math scores go up 11~12% when illiterate third-graders are held back. The scores for the federal assessment test in eighth grade are only up 3% or so.

I think it's much better to hold back kids who can't read instead of passing them (like in DC, where students who miss the majority of classes get through high school), but you can't congratulate them when they put their thumb on the scale this heavily.

I mean 'if you can't read by nine we hold you back until you can read' is what you should do with illiterate nine year olds. It's not 'putting your thumb on the scale' it's a reasonable response to a problem.

students in third grade repeat the year if they are not reading and mathing at grade level.

You think this is too heavy a thumb on the scale? I disagree. Perhaps the timing does optimize for Federal money, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also provide the benefits it seems to. I agree with you that holding a child back is much better; I think 3rd grade seems like as good a first benchmark as any. I could be convinced earlier would be better but not much later.

I'm no expert, but it's an astonishing thing to accomplish in 12 years. If they can game the metrics this badly and not improve education outcomes, the metrics were useless anyway.

Well if they're holding back kids frequently you gain a second variable that the metric is measuring: age. Are you really testing the reading capability of fourth graders if they are the age of fifth graders due to being held back? That doesn't seem particularly fair as a measure of the quality of education between schools that do and do not hold kids back.

Are you really testing the reading capability of fourth graders if they are the age of fifth graders due to being held back?

I think grade level should be a measure of academic ability rather than age. Obviously, there will be some correlation between age and academic ability due to brain development; also obviously, some kids will develop slower than their peers. If other states are just passing those kids along because they think grade level should measure time served rather than academic achievement, yes that will obviously harm them in comparison to states that don't do that. But mostly because they are pretending they've educated these kids to grade level when they haven't. If Mississippi 10 years from now has measurably better educational outcomes for their high school graduates than they did 10 years ago, who cares if some of the graduates are 19 rather 18? Gaining an actual high school education by 19 (or 20) seems vastly preferable to being cut loose at 18 and functionally illiterate.

Mississippi's success implementing the obvious strategy of making students repeat material they haven't sufficiently mastered strikes me as evidence other states are doing it wrong. Maybe some of that effect is illusion based on gaming the metrics we use to measure success. But it's such an obvious strategy that has resulted in such success that I strongly doubt there is truly no meat on those bones.

I think it's much better to hold back kids who can't read instead of passing them (like in DC, where students who miss the majority of classes get through high school), but you can't congratulate them when they put their thumb on the scale this heavily.

Do you think having kids repeat grades they couldn't pass is an invalid educational policy? If they're specifically choosing one grade level at which to assess for grade repeation and chose third grade, for this reason, this implementation is Goodhart-y, but that's not the same as "put[ting] their thumb on the scale." (Also, if there's something special about federal assessments as a metric, other than for the purposes of interstate prestige, it makes sense to implement the policy such that you'll get clear metrics in a short time-frame.)

Well, I used to live in Illinois. I'm not sure they could figure out how to bake an ice cream sandwich.

We already did state-run education and it resulted in varying degrees of intelligence across the countries as one state taught that the Earth was 6000 years old and dinosaurs are fake and another taught that vaccines are evil.

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We already did state-run education and it resulted in...

Did switching to a central system change those results?

Can you tell me which states (not individual teachers or schools, but states, as a matter of state policy) taught that the Earth was 6000 years old and dinosaurs are fake, and which ones taught that vaccines are evil?

Tennessee's Butler Act, which was the instigation for the Scopes Monkey Trial, made it illegal to teach evolution or to contradict the Biblical origin story, but even among creationists, Young Earth Creationism is a minority view (maybe not in 1925; I don't know) and I don't think even 1925 creationists claimed that dinosaurs were fake.

Also, can you point to evidence that creationists are, on average, less intelligent than atheists?

Here's the thing: I see your point and somewhat agree with it (national standards for education are probably a good thing), but when you phrase it with this kind of sneering millenium-era atheism, you don't seem to be making an argument, just looking for a chance to demonstrate iamverysmart.

And relevant to our discussion elsewhere, if I really wanted to I could mod this comment as "inflammatory claim without evidence" or "boo outgroup." Which I'm not going to do, despite all the reports and downvotes it got, because I don't think it really is, it's just making your argument in an unpleasant and sneering way. But do you perhaps begin to perceive why we have to make judgment calls about modding posts? You want to make people upset and express your contempt for your outgroup, but you'd undoubtedly find it very unfair and mean if I modded you for this comment.

I am an atheist and I think creationism is stupid, btw. So none of this is coming from a place of personal bias.

but even among creationists, Young Earth Creationism is a minority view (maybe not in 1925; I don't know)

This depends on what you count as creationism. YEC is definitely more common in the US than true old earth creationism but intelligent design is probably more common than either and the median 'God created the world and we know this because the bible says so' type couldn't tell you which of the three he believes.

YEC is definitely more common in the US than true old earth creationism

Is it? I guess you're right, it does depend on how broadly you define creationism. (Some Christians say they believe evolution happened but God guided it, which is close to intelligent design but not quite, IMO.) But my impression at least from more intellectual and scientifically-educated creationists is that most of them don't necessarily believe the world is literally 6000 years old.

I can't speak to the rest of the country, but in Texas the use of scientific and intellectual arguments generally points to more commitment to the Usher Chronology(what people usually mean by 6000 years old), not less, because the Usher Chronology needs more epicycles than old earth creationism.

I mean it is true that if you count intelligent design(which in its heyday was popular enough to receive official endorsement from the Catholic church in addition to the usual protestant churches) as old earth creationism it's more popular than young earth creationism- and probably evolution as well. But I think it's probably best to see intelligent design as a middle ground between creationism and evolution; it quite explicitly allows for non-theistic mechanisms the way true creationism doesn't.

I never understood this take that evolution is the demarcation of a good education. It was amusing back in the 2000 when dunking on creationists was cool but I would assert it was much more to do with signaling then general intelligence.

  1. General scientific literacy is awful among the general population.

  2. Even among those with scientific literacy "Macro" Evolution has to rank very low on the usefulness scale.

  3. Evolution at the high school level takes a few hours for a smart kid to wrap their head around.

IIRC committed YEC's have a better understanding of evolution than committed evolution believers because YEC can't function without lots of defined microevolution mechanisms(eg baraminology). Of course otherwise educated YEC's mostly do have complex scientific-ish mechanisms they point to which give the exact same results as evolutionary science. Epicycles happen because they work.

Given the simplicity and elegance of the concept, rejection of evolution is a litmus test for capture of education by people who use motivated reasoning to ignore important truths about the world. This was a big deal back in the '90s and '00s, when the Christian right was a major force in education policy.

Now that the left is dominant, one might propose similar litmus tests for capture of educational institutions by people who use motivated reasoning on the left, but most of the "skeptic" associations that fought against evolution in schools have been captured by the left.

it resulted in varying degrees of intelligence

Varying degrees of scientific accuracy, you mean?

My mom was very into Creationism. Her college degree was in biology. She got As on a bunch of evolutionary biology courses, and liked to go to Creationist conferences, debates, read books about it, and so on. None of the many Creationists I interacted with tried to argue that dinosaurs are fake. One didn't like vaccines, and was homeschooling. That's kind of a weird homeschooler position. Aside from Covid, ate-vax codes kind of crunch liberal to me, with kids in oatmeal colored overalls going to forest school until they're eight.

Aside from Covid, ate-vax codes kind of crunch liberal to me, with kids in oatmeal colored overalls going to forest school until they're eight.

It did. Homeschoolers were trending vaccine skeptic ever since the HPV vaccine controversies but after covid...

What else do you think might contribute to different levels of average intelligence between states? Have you considered that it might track substantially with the different demographics of those states?

Every time some progressive online shows a map of “average level of college completion” or “average literacy rates” or “average IQ” and the Deep South is a great big splotch of unfavorable results, I have to wonder whether it has occurred to this person that the *percent of the population who are black” is far, far higher in that part of the country than it is in places like California, which is only 6% black, less than half the national average. That difference alone accounts for the lion’s share of the IQ differences between states. Yes, there are some states, such as West Virginia, which are both very white and do very poorly on measures of average intelligence and education, but those are quite few and far between. Alabama’s educational deficiencies would flip in a heartbeat if the state were not 26% black.

This comment isn't very charitably phrased, but even if one looks past that: so what? You haven't made an argument that I should care why people in some other state teach their children to believe different things, or even things that are objectively false. It is their business, not mine, what they teach their children. It doesn't hurt me. So why, exactly, should I mind what they do or don't teach?

They vote.

In practice, I encourage you to look into what otherwise educated YEC's actually believe. It has enough epicycles to not really matter if the mechanism is inaccurate.

Are you against universal suffrage? If not why not?

I actually think I might be, although not for ideological alignment purposes. I have warmed up to the idea that we should bring back the requirement to own property, or something like it. That way the voters have skin in the game. Currently many people don't and I do think it negatively influences the way they vote.

I also don't think Heinlein was too far off the mark in Startup Troopers. You get to vote once you prove that you are willing to act selflessly in service of your fellow countrymen. In general I think we have too much focus on rights in America, and not enough on social obligations. Rights are great! But at the same time rights should go hand in hand with responsibility, and I feel like American culture has dropped the ball on that count.

But at the same time rights should go hand in hand with responsibility

This leaves you with no rights. "You have the right to free speech. You have the responsibility to use that speech in a pro-social manner" means you don't have the right to free speech.

Though anarcho-tyranny and socialism have left us with rights and responsibilities... just some people get the rights and others get the responsibilities. I get to use my taxes to (indirectly) pay for the gun the Camden gangbanger uses, a gun I'm not permitted to have.

I get to use my taxes to (indirectly) pay for the gun the Camden gangbanger uses, a gun I'm not permitted to have.

What, exactly, is the mechanism by which this happens? I'm genuinely curious as to how this "also my tax dollars somehow" thing works, as you allege.

Money is fungible. If you give a Camden gangbanger $300 in food stamps, that's an extra $300 he has for a Saturday Night Special.

The Camden gangbanger is almost certainly receiving welfare of some sort. Probably fraudulently.

And? They are entitled to their opinions and to vote on what they wish. That isn't a reason to control what education they can receive.

To be blunt: I consider progressive ideas (identity politics, belief in equity rather than equality, etc etc) far more harmful than the notion that the earth is 6000 years old, or that people shouldn't take vaccines. So if I were to support controlling education so as to shape future voters, I would be trying to stamp those ideas out, not the ones @justawoman mentioned. I'm sure that would give her no great comfort if I was to have my way. Which is of course why it benefits us all to support more local governance of teaching standards in the first place: when the government can dictate what is and is not appropriate to teach in a top-down fashion, it can be used to control ideas you find repugnant just as easily as those you find desirable. So it's best to not give that power to the government in the first place, or if you must give it over (which we probably must), then do your best to make sure that the damage it can do is limited. By letting these decisions be made as locally as possible, we make it difficult for a bad actor (whatever that means to you) to hijack the education of all the children in this country.

And now we have every state teaching that women are undefinable enigmas.

Creationism seems like a good target because it codes very low intelligence, but what were the negative societal consequences of believing creationism? Creationists don't believe in climate change enough to reduce carbon emissions before the world ends in 2012? They think God made man and woman and are harder to convince to self sterilise?

Also which state taught that vaccines were evil?

Creationists definitionally don't believe that global warming can be catastrophic because God promised no repeats of the flood. But their views on eg biology, geology, etc line up pretty well with scientific consensus even if it takes epicycles to get there.

Interestingly, the YEC alt-academia consensus on Covid-19 was more accurate than the societal elite consensus because it made the prediction that Covid would microevolve(their term) to trade lethality for contagion until it was just a cold. This is basically what happened.

I think the idea that the states won’t ever do their own work in some form or fashion is false. And this is the entire premise of DOGE — much of what the federal government is doing is not something it should be doing, and in fact so much of it has not only not helped, but has caused real harm. We have a Department of Education that not only doesn’t educate our kids, but wastes our money basically standing in the way of kids learning the very basic concepts they need to understand their world. They’ve been pushing to waste limited class time on woke propaganda, and have pushed “trendy” schemes on schools that simply do not work. They spend billions of dollars to basically stand in the way of kids trying to get an education. Worse, they destroy the potential of those few kids who are thriving in schools by forcing them to learn at the pace of the slowest kids in the class.

Turning education back over to the states has some advantages. Because the department is smaller, it simply doesn’t have the funds to mandate weird trendy ideas of education. They need to have programs that work well and work cheaply. No more sight words and guessing based on pictures, instead learn phonics and sound out the words. No more new mathematical trends, use the stuff that has worked for generations. Furthermore, because the state is much closer to the people, it’s not going to be able to get away with pushing propaganda that’s wildly out of step with what the citizens of that state believe, if they do so at all. The citizens of Oklahoma want bibles in their kiss’s schools, they voted for that. The people of California would push a more liberal ideology. This is how federalism is supposed to work. States are smaller and much easier to bring to heel by the voting population.

You know there is a need for at least some sight words in teaching English reading?

What's wrong with sight words?

I have a kindergarten age child. I am mostly happy with what she is learning in school, including some new math stuff and sight words.

The main reason I'm happy is that many of the concepts they teach are how I eventually learned to do things. But I learned them on my own after years of struggling to do it the "right" way and not making much progress.

Words like "the" simply don't make sense to "sound it out". In a logical phonetic alphabet, "th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word, and memorize what those three letters together mean.

I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself. The way they encouraged my generation to figure it out was to literally bury us in math problems. You either figured it out and math became easy, or you were labelled a 'struggling' student with potential ADHD because you didn't want to spend hours a day doing math problems the hard and slow way.

I do agree with your main point that the department of education sucks. I just think you would have seen adoption of some of these new teaching techniques without the department, since some of them are good.

What's wrong with sight words?

Because you are limited to knowing words you have memorized like they’re hieroglyphs, so when you grow up and you run into new words like “xylocarp” or “gubernatorial” you effectively can’t read or pronounce them. Which caps your reading level at sub-high school and leaves you unable to quickly parse large volumes of difficult text.

The "sight words" approach is perfectly fine for common short words with inconsistent pronunciation, IMO. My 5-year-old can sound out a variety of easy words at present, but still gets tripped up on issues like "do" and "go" having different vowel sounds, or "here" and "there", and I don't see any alternative to just having kids memorize them.

"th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound.

Old English and modern Icelandic have thorn for this already. We can just bring it back.

I vote for eth. Old English used them interchangeably, eth fits the Latin alphabet better visually, and the distinction between upper and lower case is clearer.

Besides, everyone who sees the Ðragon Age logo should learn to groan as we have.

In Icelandic eth is for th in the, thorn is for th in thin. It would make sense for English to have a similar system today.

Ðis is ðe way.

Huh. Is it a coincidence that it looks like stereotypical Jamaican pidgin? Or is it a relict?

The replacement of "th" (/ð/) with "d" (/d/) is a characteristic of Jamaican patois, and the similarity of ð and d (or Ð and D) is likely because people perceive the sounds to be similar, but I don't think there's a direct relation.

I just followed the advice of the guy above me and replaced Th with Ð. That’s all I did. If you think it’s Jamaican cool. I like the idea of simplifying th3 phonetic system, and I think adding ć for ch and ś for sh would be cool as well (both come from polish)

But of course it’s probably never happening, so the kids will have to suffer digraphs.

Śe sold seaśells at ðe seaśore just looks cool.

More comments

th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word

You can just teach th, like ph and ch, has a special sound (actually 2, voiced and unvoiced). There's no need for something to be part of an official alphabet to teach its pattern. ough is the main blocker, today.

And in phonics that’s exactly what they do. I remember learning to read in Catholic schools(which did not rely on the whole word method) having to do tedious worksheets where the th/sh/ch had to be encoded to let the teacher know it was a single sound. Like written sounding out.

I think the person you're replying to is referring to the whole language approach to reading. The popular implementations of this eschew phonics entirely, and instruct kids to use only context clues and pictures to figure out what word is on the page. The "Sold A Story" podcast dives deep into the origins of this and its many failures.

It's a great podcast, highly recommended. Among other things I learned that even this topic is culture war. George W. Bush's push for phonics based instruction was resisted hard by educators, apparently because it was coming from W.

Also very revealing in how much of education is driven by trendiness and personality cults. A dumb fad like Reading Recovery can damage a whole generation.

Phonics is also boring work for elementary school teachers in a way whole word is not.

It's frustrating to me that this would even be a consideration for teachers. At my job, when the company wants me to do something boring, I don't get to just decide to not do it. It should be the same way for teachers: we don't care you find it boring, it's effective, and your job is to teach not to be entertained.

I think it’s less about the teachers and more about the kids. Somehow teachers started to think that they need to be “entertaining” to get kids to learn things, so things that work (like learning phonics, or memorizing times tables, or memorizing the dates and people in historical events) but are boring for kids don’t happen. Instead, there are a lot of silly but fun trendy ways of teaching— dramas, artwork, imagining yourself as someone in that event, etc. they don’t work, but the kids have fun and that’s what matters especially for elementary school teachers. Then the kids who don’t know the basics eventually reach a plateau and the methods that they could use to figure out what they don’t know are things they never learned to do. Whole word and guessing based on pictures doesn’t work when you’re reading a dense textbook with no pictures.

I would be interested to read a novella length exploration of the situation. There are some tasks that are themselves fine, but almost nobody is willing to do them all day every day.

It's really hard to get special education assistants, for instance. They're paid poorly to follow around a severely disabled child with poor life prospects, who can't communicate with them very well, and watch them fail at a lot of ordinary and expected tasks. Sometimes the kids get frustrated and lash out at them, and hurt them. Then they quit, often after a couple of months. It's a bad job that can't be done by those who usually do bad jobs, like working in meat processing plants. Then it becomes worse when they're understaffed, which is most of the time. There's some legal liability as well. There are adjustments that could be made at the system level, but are not, for various legal and institutional reasons.

I'm especially curious about some of the ages involved. Five, six, and seven year olds mostly still seem happy to be learning to read and write, and it's important to have strong first grade teachers in a school, especially.

My state teaches phonics and is fine with it, but are now training upper elementary and middle school teachers in phonics, to try to re-teach those who didn't get it the first time. I'm not especially optimistic. I don't think there's necessarily a learning window for reading a semi-phonetic language like English, but if someone is in sixth grade and hasn't learned phonics yet, they must certainly have baggage around it. Their language arts teacher is unlikely to suddenly help them realize what consonant clusters involving "h" are all about.

I don’t think there’s a window, but I think the limit comes with the complexity of texts that would hold the attention of a child that age. First graders are fine with very simple stories using simple words and concepts. A fourth grader wants to read more complex stuff.

There’s quite a lot that teachers do which makes me make a surprised face and go ‘really? And they’re not fired for this?’.

This informs a lot about why education works the way it does

For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading ... we hated it ...

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do ... we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out

https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/

Districts also have professional development budgets that firms are competing for.

In my district every Wednesday is an early release day so teachers can participate in professional development. This has got to be the only job in the world where 10% of your time is spent on training and you only work 9 months a year.

We used to have that, and have lost it. Test scores are the same, teachers are more stressed, but maybe parents pay less for childcare? I'm not actually sure if parents pay less for childcare or not, since the after district childcare for working parents is a lump sum amount, which increases in line with inflation.

My current district gives me a set amount, and lets me spend it attending art workshops. It may or may not be a good use of public funds, but is absolutely a better use than the other mandated trainings I've gone to.

Yeah that’s another huge sector of waste that could use trimming since none of that training is even remotely useful, and a lot of its actively hostile political propaganda

My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.

On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics. It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually. But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there. And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.

All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction. And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities. School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.

But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong. And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.

My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.

When I first heard about this debate over teaching methods, I asked my parents how I learned to read, because I couldn't remember anything other than some frustration when I first went to school that some of my classmates didn't know the alphabet yet. Apparently they read to me but made no other effort to instruct me on the subject, and one day I just started reading the books back to them, having either figured it out on my own or having committed them to memory was simply miming the action of looking at and turning the pages. Which is to say, I still have no idea how I learned to read.

Same. My parents also recalled I had a fascination with signs, especially road signs and exit signs.

I think we’re largely on the same page. I honestly think that most o& the trends end up hurting the below average kids. And when adding in the reduced instruction time to make room for The Narrative, those kids are toast. A smart kid can learn on his own so taking away class time for LGBTQ stuff or Black History or whatever isn’t a big deal. If you have a kid who’s falling behind, he needs every second of help he can get.

Although to be honest, I think most of the problem of education is that we don’t track kids as many other developed countries do. Every kid is put on the college bound track unless he specifically wants off, and the culture pushes college to an absurd degree meaning that unless they’re introduced to other tracks, the current will carry them to university and they won’t be able to keep up. If you track kids, not only can you tailor the methods o& instruction to what best serves that group of students, but you can make sure that they end up with skills they can use to support themselves.

There’s a podcast called “Sold a Story” that’s worth listening to if you have a kid that age learning to read.

Basically the “sight reading” thing looks like students are progressing, but then soon hit a wall they can’t get past because they weren’t actually learning how to read just how to identify words.

Seriously check it out. Very well done, and also infuriating with regards to how education trends are pushed.

What's wrong with sight words?

Empirically, it's much harder for students to learn to read using the whole-word approach compared to phonics. Of course with phonics there are still words you'll need to just memorize (including "the").

I don't have a specific example in mind with the math stuff, but it seemed similar when I went and looked at new math content. It's often teaching the shorthand that I had to figure out myself.

Yes, but it's teaching it to children who don't know the longhand. It's skipping steps, which makes life harder. To make it worse, it tends to use nonstandard terminology that neither parents nor mathematicians will understand ("friendly numbers" is often singled out here). There are also problems where it uses some shortcut approach when it doesn't make sense, and then students who work it out another way that they've been taught get marked wrong. For instance, it might teach them to do 63 * 47 as 60 * 40 + 60 * 7 + 40 * 3 + 7 * 3 (and have them draw the lattice), when the longhand approach is no harder and a student taking the easiest approach (63 * 50 - 63 * 3) would be marked wrong.

This article by Richard Hanania is very relevant. He argues that when comparing net inward migration across the fifty states, Americans' revealed preferences consistently show that they would rather live in more economically libertarian states than not.

How much of that is that is housing?

Saying people prefer to live in states with abundant housing is somewhat misleading - at the margin people have to live in states with abundant housing because of the pigeonhole principle. What we actually see is that people are willing to pay a premium to live in California and not Texas, but there isn't enough housing in California to accommodate them.

This is still a government failure, but it is a quite specific one rather than "people would rather live in more economically libertarian states".

(FWIW, I think Texas is sufficiently well-governed that quality of government is an important pull factor, but other fast-growing red states are not).

I don't think you can disentangle housing from a whole host of factors. For working adults, the supply of housing is only one part of an equation, and the other half of that equation contains within it a pretty good proxy for economic vibrancy and economic libertarianism. If I were looking to live in a place where the cheapest apartment for rent is 3000$ but where I can easily find a job with a high salary that makes it trivial to pay that, then why would I even complain about the price of housing?

People leave California not because the price of housing in a vacuum is too high, but because the californian economy cannot pay people enough to support those high prices.

People are also moving for lower tax burden, though, and Texas and Florida are often able to attract corporate moves by offering lower regulation.

I mean, I think it depends on the person. People in tech and entertainment want to be in California because those industries are centered in California. That does create a certain demographic who wants to live in California because they’re wealthy enough to pay to live there.

Even in red states, you find people clustered in red areas around blue cities. People want to work in the big cities because the high value industries are clustered in cities. If possible, they prefer to live in red counties that surround those cities because it’s cheaper and has less crime. And I think the reason for the people willing to live in California for those industries, it’s a combination of those industries being very lucrative and the relative distance between LA or San Francisco and the nearest available cheap red state housing. In my area, you can live in bright red Arnold MO and commute to bright blue St. Louis in about an hour. Most middle class people do that because it’s cheaper, safer, and easier than trying to live in the city.

And I think the reason for the people willing to live in California for those industries, it’s a combination of those industries being very lucrative and the relative distance between LA or San Francisco and the nearest available cheap red state housing.

Judging by Scott's article on the subject, housing in the Central Valley is also relatively cheap, isn't it?

The climate is terrible, and pollution and crime are rampant there. The Central Valley - especially the southern bits - is a miserable place.

I haven't read the Hanania article and thus can't speak to his arguments, but if more economically libertarian states tend to have more abundant housing, then that seems to be the mechanism by which Americans come to preferring to live in such states. Revealed preference for economically libertarian states doesn't mean that someone is judging states on the basis of their economic policies and preferring to move to one that's more economically libertarian. Revealed preference means that states that are more economically libertarian tend to create conditions that cause more people to decide that moving there is a better decision than moving elsewhere. The abundance of housing could be one of them. So I wouldn't say that that's misleading.

This occurred to me as well.

I couldn’t agree more with @zeke5123a below, 50 experiments is always better than 1. Some state governments will be more competent than others. Some will be more ‘woke’ or ‘anti woke’ than others; they may be correlated or inversely correlated, who knows? But at least they will exist.

For the same reason, I hope some lib state enacts an NHS style healthcare system in the near future (presumably with some caveats to prevent out-of-staters from using it). Not because I want to see it fail, but because I don’t see why it shouldn’t be tried at a state level.

More controversially, I feel the same is true about mandatory ID cards and hate speech laws, by the way. If Vermont wants Euro-style hate speech laws, I really don’t care. Plenty of states will oppose them. The same is true for gun control, for civil rights, for gay marriage, for religion in government.

Let the feds handle foreign policy, defense, intelligence, some interstate policing and - at arms length via the fed - monetary policy. Nothing more.

Always better? Do we really need 50 different DMVs in our laboratories of democracy? Anyway, that's the system we have for education, it's mostly run at the state level. This matt yglesias post discusses what DoE actually does, I wanted to do a toplevel post about it.

It is a terrible idea to have some states have bad education and other have good. That’s why we had the government setting a universal standard for everyone.

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There isn't any valuable metric that we can conclusively say has improved under the DOE's tenure.

Yes, blue states should be prevented from destroying their own education systems. That’s not what the federal DofEd does.

More controversially, I feel the same is true about mandatory ID cards and hate speech laws, by the way. If Vermont wants Euro-style hate speech laws, I really don’t care. Plenty of states will oppose them. The same is true for gun control, for civil rights, for gay marriage, for religion in government.

As a red-triber in a very blue state, who is often willing to support federalism even when it harms his interests, I draw the line at my basic rights as an American. I shouldn't have to leave my home and my family's legacy here to secure them.

I want to agree, but that's the same thing leftists will say when they try to make every red state allow abortions and teenage gender changes.

It’s true. Ultimately it comes down to a question of what those basic rights are.

They are not arguing in good faith and no amount of accepting compromises to what should be yours will get them to accept compromises in what they want.

I never understood the liberal and leftist antagonism to this. It's an obvious compromise, fits right in with their ideas of multiculturalism, Diversity Is Our Strength, etc., and if you're so sure your ideas are better than others', this arrangement will make it plainly obvious soon enough.

I can only interpret as a deep insecurity that letting the experiment run will actually disprove, rather than prove their ideas.

Progressivism is a universalist religion; "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere", "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". They don't want to experiment with letting states ban gay marriage or allow firearms for the same reason Christians don't want to experiment with letting states allow abortion or reinstate slavery; it is wrong, and it is evil, and it must be cleansed from the face of the Earth by fire and steel.

As @Capital_Room put it:

There is a certain kind of person for whom moral disapproval and the drive to intervene are one and the same thing, inseparable. To them, a lack of a burning need to stop a thing is proof that you don't actually disapprove of it. It's the classic stereotype of the D&D Paladin played badly: "see evil, smite evil." They are constitutionally incapable of shrugging and saying "none of my business." And the Blue Tribe is full of them.

Consider every missionary of an evangelizing, expansionist faith who has set out to convert the heathen — by fire and sword if necessary — because it's their duty, it's the right thing to do, and it's for the heathen's own good. If you have the One True Faith, the true set of Universal Human Rights, the Objectively Correct Morality, then you have a duty to spread and enforce it everywhere you can.

Why fight the Red Tribe? Because if you don't, you are complicit in every wrong they do. If you let the Red Tribe keep being transphobic rather than try to stop them, then the blood of every trans kid in a Red Tribe area who commits suicide is on your hands. Like Kendi says, you are either actively anti-racist, or you are racist. It's one or the other. You are either fighting evil, or you are evil.

Why does the Blue Tribe hate the Red Tribe? Because it's in their nature to hate anyone who fails to share their values. Because this need to be a moral busybody, a crusader, a Social Justice Warrior, is a core characteristic of the Tribe, woven into their culture (and probably also a non-trivial amount of genetic predisposition).

Why does the Blue Tribe continually attack the Red Tribe, trying to force them to convert, or otherwise eliminate the "Red culture"? Because they're fundamentally incapable of not doing so. They can't stop themselves, and thus they will never stop.

I don’t think kids in Alabama deserve bad education that puts them behind their peers because their parents aren’t very smart

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Poor, minority heavy states do badly at education. It doesn’t have much to do with policy it’s about what they have to work with.

And I don't think kids in California deserve to be chemically castrated because they gravitated to the wrong kind of toy. Would you rather have my views applied locally or globally?

Do you have any evidence that kids in California are being chemically castrated?

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Anyone who's on puberty blockers is being chemically castrated. It's the same drug that's used for both.

Okay, well, that’s not true, but you do you.

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Do you have any evidence that it's not true? Like I said, they use the exact same drug, with the exact same purpose (sex-hormone suppression).

Also, answer my question: do you want my views applied globally or locally?

More comments

In 2024, Alabama had a higher average literacy score than Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Texas, and California, to name a few. And the same or higher percentage of students at basic reading level. Who is getting a bad education because of dumb parents?

Can you link the study that says that?

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https://www.newsweek.com/math-reading-scores-us-states-2022836

1 second of googling.

The rules of this forum are….? Suggestions?

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Demanding rigor in a rhetorical cage match is a fatality. OP's statement was clear and google-able at a copy/paste, first-result level. The off-handed claim about Alabama sucking didn't help either, some around here might call it a dog-whistle. Anyway, save your battles.

Claim: it's dangerous for different states to adopt different standards from each other.

  • Would state A risk an invasion by an entire state-B population of underachieving morons--with no economic, political or militaristic boundaries between states as protection?
  • When do states have the right to fight each other?
  • Should we expect that all of our elites will eventually be foreigners because we've dumbed down our back bench?
  • How do you prevent bad localized ideas, un-scientific methods, and fads from chewing through the populace?
  • What are the controls?
  • What happens to national culture?
  • How will we get people to continue to drink milk?
  • What will we do if we suddenly realize we've made a bad national decision? Dept. II: Edu-harder?
  • How will we recognize or measure the impact of losing the department/relying on individual states?
  • Is it all just money--or lack thereof?
  • How will the universities--and by extension small communities supported by such schools--survive without a government college grants program? Is it like moving a highway?
  • Does all of this work to raise the prestige of the Ivy's, Stanford, etc.?
  • Will it be a boom-time for community colleges and State universities?
  • Like...worst of all...what if it works?

Here's a convenient summary of the National Center for Education Statistics data on National Assessment of Educational Progress. To clarify, this does not include adult literacy, just students in grade school. Which I think is a better view of current education standings than adult literacy.

I never understood the liberal and leftist antagonism to this.

It's pretty much entirely historical as a result of Jim Crow. Localism in the UK is weakly left-coded, although in practice it is generally supported by the party out of power in Westminster at the time. In Spain localism is strongly left-coded, but it is right-coded in Italy.

In the cases of the US, Spain, and Italy there are obvious stories about who the noisiest opponents of the centre are and how that determines the partisan valence.

That said, ID cards is a really stupid thing to push to the states (except in so far as they run the offices administering a federally determined policy, which is what happens in Germany) because it is so tied to immigration policy, which is a federal responsibility for good reasons.

Healthcare policy is run at a subnational level almost everywhere - even in the UK Scotland and Wales have their own NHSs.

It's pretty much entirely historical as a result of Jim Crow. Localism in the UK is weakly left-coded, although in practice it is generally supported by the party out of power in Westminster at the time. In Spain localism is strongly left-coded, but it is right-coded in Italy.

I agree that localism (much like free speech) is often used cynically, but that's neither a typical response, nor an actual argument against localism.

"Muh Jim Crow" also doesn't quite explain it either. Are you saying American anti-localists will change their mind if you constitutionally take that issue off the table?

Healthcare policy is run at a subnational level almost everywhere - even in the UK Scotland and Wales have their own NHSs.

The world consists of more than the UK and the US.

” Muh Jim Crow" also doesn't quite explain it either. Are you saying American anti-localists will change their mind if you constitutionally take that issue off the table?

No - what I am suggesting operates at a much more emotional level than that. The Civil Rights movement is the heroic epic of the American left, so in the stories American lefties tell themselves the heroes are centralisers and the villains cry “States’ Rights”. Whereas the heroic epic of the Spanish left is resistance to Franco, so in the stories Spanish lefties tell themselves the good guys are calling for autonomy for Catalunya and the Basque Country while the villains cry “Todos por la patria”.

The world consists of more than the UK and the US

I know. Having checked my research, there are more countries with centralised healthcare policy than I thought, but it is still generally devolved.

  • France is centralised
  • The German system is heavily decentralised, but the Krankenkasse are not organised on State lines, so technically counts as Federalised
  • In Italy healthcare is run by the regions
  • In Spain healthcare is run by the autonomous communities
  • In Denmark and Sweden the ground rules are set nationally but the healthcare system is actually run at County level
  • In Switzerland healthcare is run by the cantons
  • In Poland the national government and the regions share responsibility for healthcare in a way which appears to be incomprehensible to everyone except Polish bureaucrats
  • In Canada healthcare is run by the provinces
  • Australia is centralised
  • In India healthcare is run by the states.

Because people negatively impacted by their opponents’ ideas have primary moral consideration.

I can only interpret as a deep insecurity* that letting the experiment run will actually disprove, rather than prove their ideas.

I don't think so. Rather the opposite really - true believer leftists are very secure in their belief of the correctness of their ideas, to the point where experiments are in fact immoral, since people will end up suffering from the wrong solutions, and unnecessary because the good leftists already know the correct solutions.

Does this sound boo-outgroup? I'm serious, as an ex-leftist who spent decades in a leftist bubble and still lives next door to it. Experimentation may seem like a golden compromise to someone with enough epistemic humility, but epistemic humility is completely absent from the water the left swims in. They know. They know what the problems and the solutions are, and experimentation can only be worse than doing the obviously correct thing.

There's also a practical, political reason not to allow this - they have long-marched through most institutions; why ever give up now?

ever in a million years did the people expect that this would fail to move the needle on any of the reasons they voted for it (immigration, economics) or the complete lack of a plan for delivering it,

To be clear you are referring to the people who voted yes to Brexit right? Because anyone else could and did very easily predict all of those things.

The first girl I ever kissed later did a PhD essentially proposing local government shouldn't be left to regulate things too complex to understand, like energy policy, rather federal or even supranational bodies should.(Our later friendship ended when I pushed for details and asked her opinions on natural counterpoints.) When regulatory capture happens to a national body, the whole thing collapses. When regulatory capture happens in a town, others can still thrive (and you can leave). At e.g. the US state (or European national) level, a few will have enough economy of scale to pass e.g. textbook reform which leads to smaller states following their lead, and e.g. publishers writing books targeting them. Churn happens when a state switches allegiance. Interesting stuff!

There is a thorny tension in that, yes, there are challenges that seem difficult to solve without massive coordination--and suborning lots of polities to a higher power is a decent way to sidestep the usual difficulties of coordination problems (Sidenote: also available here!). However, some of these same challenges are the ones that are so high-stakes and consequential that getting it wrong can be really bad, and worse, "getting it wrong" can also scale too well. I think the "experiment" mindset is the right way to go about tackling these issues, when it comes down to it.

Out of interest, why are you linking to an archived version of Scott's post? The article is still up on his old website.

Some people here claim that the old, pre-edited version of Meditations is better. I haven't actually sat down to compare any changes, and to be frank, the archived version was one of the first results that came up on DDG...and not Scott's actual old blog, for some reason.

Scott edited out the fire in later revisions of that post, try this one: http://web.archive.org/web/20140801022058/http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

He went back and edited it in ways which are generally agreed to weaken the piece (not that they change its core point or anything).

What Trump likely hasn't foreseen is the likely response to this. I consider the Incentive Problem at the Heart of the American Justice System one of the most important articles written about America in the last decade. It's worth reading in its entirety; but the tldr is something like this: the tension between spending their own money and other people's money has created the disaster that is modern American policing, sentencing, judging and confinement. States don't want to pay for the operation of their own prisons at the same time they want to spend less on policing, so they'd rather give it up to for-profit prisons or shove it off to federal responsibility while enacting a weird kind of anarcho-tyranny.

I want to talk about one of the first points in this article.

Beccaria argued that punishments should be intended primarily to deter future crimes rather than retaliate for past ones, and further, that three factors influenced the deterrent effect of punishment: its certainty, swiftness, and severity, in that order. Beccaria reasoned that increasing severity of punishment produced sharply diminishing returns on deterrent value, because people will simply become desensitized to severe punishment and have difficulty weighing it rationally when conducting a cost-benefit analysis of their decision to commit crimes.

I know this makes sense and has data backing it with regards to deterrence. But I want to talk about a vastly under-discussed part of incarceration, which is incapacitation.

As a bit of background, I am an attorney who has worked as a prosecutor as well as many other parts of the law over a mid sized career so far.

The argument about punishment is wrong, because the goal isn't just punishment, the goal is no more crimes by that specific individual during that specific time period that he/she is incarcerated. You see this most importantly IMO with people who are serial thieves. They will have an MO. Its either retail theft where they keep going to Macys and stealing something like perfume or $90 shirts, or they go into a grocery store and steal booze. Others have the MO of following Amazon trucks and hoovering up delivery boxes. The point is, often these people will have 3+ pending cases at once, then they take a plea, get a short sentence, then are back out thieving a year later, get 3 more cases, take a plea. Repeat for 30 years.

Prison can solve this problem. First, we can have legislatures eliminate sentences running concurrently for multiple offenses. Commit 3 thefts, get 1 year on each, that is 3 years instead of 1 (under the current system). Thats still a deal for the defendant because they are now facing a max of 18 instead of 6 years (or whatever the math is for your specific state). Second, bring back strikes laws. You do some time, next time you do more, third time there is release even if it is just nonviolent theft. These crimes do significantly impede the law and order of communities.

side note, this sort of pattern, while common with theft, is not only relating to theft. I have seen rap sheets where people have committed 5+ burglaries, went in for a year, then committed 3 more plus a kicker charge for drugs/guns and still got out in time to be back in court a year after that second sentencing. In fact, it even happens with violent crime. I recall one case where a person's rap sheet had over 5 armed robbery convictions on it within 5 years of being back in court on another armed robbery. This sort of sentencing structure defies anything resembling sanity.

So, my conclusion is that we probably need more policing as everyone generally suggests. Boots on the ground both deterring and investigating crime. BUT we also need people to just not being allowed back into society. At this point, mere incarceration is not enough. We also need to expedite the death penalty not just for murder and sex crimes, but for all common law crimes wherein the defendant has a previous felony common law conviction. This is a cost saving measure. The whole anti-death penalty bar needs to be put in a corner. There shouldn't even be sentencing hearings at some point. Just ask 12 people did this person commit this crime. If yes, 100 days later the defendant gets to walk the plank. Literally. We should also bring back public hangings to assuage the deterrence-inclined folks.

My God.

I am replying to my own post because as I read the article I continued to find more and more problems. This person has...essentially no grasp on the reality of the situation in criminal law. Are public defenders underfunded? Maybe. When compared to the states attorneys they are up against? Not at all. The SAs have to handle every case in a courtroom, and have the burden of proof. The PD handles about half that (and in the county I worked outnumbered the SA 3 to 1) and has no real job for most of the case. In the event of trial they review the same evidence (with almost no caseload) and only need to prevent the SA from overcoming an incredibly high bar of proof.

Juries and grand juries also make basically no sentencing decisions. Those are made by judges, who are mostly just attorneys who are good at raising money. I dont think that is partisan.

DAs are elected to be hard on crime? Does this guy live in reality? This happens from time to time, but in the most crime ridden jurisdictions the pendulum swings back and forth. Sometimes hard on crime is a winner politically, sometimes soft on crime is. Either way, because this is America, the Defendant wins if he wins at any part of the case.

Mass incarceration started in the 70s? You mean the same time the CRA was kicking in, communities were being destroyed by crime and the prelude to the coke epidemic was manifesting? You dont say.

I suppose the police union part is somewhat fine, but they are far less insidious than teachers unions in my experience. The sex crimes alone are enough to end those. But his argument is flawed by comparing it to NIMBYs. Police have clearly shown that the unions aren't the real problem, it is police haters that made the unions needed (also a good indicator is that it was the 70s when such people started to take power). If cops were able to billy club thieves and then hang them without facing litigation we could field many more for far cheaper. As it stands, they are afraid to arrest a guy who hit a stop sign with a bottle a Jose Cuervo in the back seat because a judge might find the arrest was improper.

Overall, I find this article linked to be incorrect from my personal experience as an attorney in a large major metropolitan area who has worked in criminal law.

If cops were able to billy club thieves and then hang them without facing litigation we could field many more for far cheaper. As it stands, they are afraid to arrest a guy who hit a stop sign with a bottle a Jose Cuervo in the back seat because a judge might find the arrest was improper.

It's anarcho-tyranny. They can't do that, but they can arrest a guy and threaten to send him to Riker's Island because he rode his bicycle on the sidewalk to avoid hitting a cop who stepped in front of him. And if you give cops more free reign, they'll do more of the latter because it's easier and safer than the former.

Yes. Effective policing runs the unavoidable risk of a copper billy-clubbing or shooting a black person on video. Then mainstream media covers it, college campuses and urban areas protest over it, and our streaming services make movies, shows, and documentaries about it. Then Democrats swoop in like heroes to implement policy that will kneecap law enforcement, and the societal burden of impulsive criminals will shift back to law abiding citizens, a lot of whom voted for Democrats in the first place.

That said, I blame our media apparatus and academics far more than I blame Democrats. Dems generally just lick their finger and stick it in the air to see which way the cultural wind is blowing and they position their sails accordingly. Journalists, on the other hand, dedicate their lives to exposing unfairness; except the unfairness they uncover almost exclusively involves the kind that benefits their belief that current power systems must be dismantled. What they rarely consider is the new unfairness that emerges when their version of justice is implemented. When equity replaces order the burden doesn’t vanish, it just gets redistributed and usually onto the very people who can't afford to carry it.

I agree with you and one consolation is that print media is dying and with it a whole cohort of left wing journos who no longer have a livelihood. There’s fewer and fewer each year, and That’s a Good Thing

As an aside, does anyone else remember when in 2019 you could get banned on Twitter for telling a journalist to learn to code? Ahhh memories

This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders.

Why do you figure it is this way around, as opposed to Brussels just being a fig leaf that would let politicians point and say "we had no choice, it was ordained from above" for unpopular policies that they themselves actually wanted all along?

I'm sorry, this is a dumb joke, but I can't help it.

"Abolish education and science? That would be the end of civilisation as we know it!"

"We're only abolishing the department. Education and science will flourish."

"Without a government department? Impossible!"

I realise this may not apply to the American Department of Education, which for all I know does a lot more than just provide funding, but sometimes you've got to reach for the low-hanging fruit.

I realise this may not apply to the American Department of Education, which for all I know does a lot more than just provide funding

Apparently it moves around about 13% of education funding. It also provides some requirements, for instance around Individual Education Plans, which are fairly expensive, and mostly say things like "J will have additional time on tests" and "J will have preferential seating." They may also provide some of the rules that lead to special education positions being chronically understaffed, with entire positions unfilled for years at a time.

Despite having a kind of unnecessary fluff education job, I would still be interested to see what would actually change without them.

It’ll be bad for kids with behavioural problems mostly who require education assistants to shadow them constantly lest they have a meltdown.

But looking on the bright side, those kids seriously shouldn’t be in normal classrooms anyway, as they cause severe disruption. These kids have severe ADHD, FASD, or autism, and require some level of institutionalization, not “schooling” per se

Yeah.

Transportation is a major impediment. There are some kids I know who clearly should not be in an enormous industrial elementary school, and are having constant meltdowns, but are in general smart and capable enough. They would probably do just fine in a school that wasn't forcing "transitions" every half hour or so. But their parents probably can't drive then anywhere, so the public pays a bunch of money for counselors and social workers to try to get them to put up with the environment instead.

I am neither a parent nor a teacher. I know parents whose children have sound reasons for their IEPs, and sometimes teachers weren't responsive to their childrens' legitimate needs without them. But those same parents often make light of teachers' reasonable concerns. The whole thing strikes me as an awful, dehumanizing, bureaucratic kludge for everybody involved.

I'd be interested to read about your experiences.

People have been educating their children competently for years. We don’t need to mandate curriculum from a federal or even state level. Let’s let teachers, who are with these kids 6+ hours a day and know them intimately, decide when and how to teach them.

Education has been getting gradually worse for years, unlikely that cutting the bureaucrats and grifters out of the DoE is going to make things even worse?

Oh the horror, how is little Johnny in Oregon going to learn math without a squadron of grifters in Washington getting paid?!

I mean, this assumes that 1) teachers have agency(many of them do not) and 2) they have the best interests of the kids in mind ahead of their own(at least some teachers are far more interested in going home at four o’clock and drinking margaritas). I suspect that the two problems magnify each other; the median teacher just does whatever she’s told, and the people telling her how to teach will mostly be in the ‘we work til 4’ camp.

how is little Johnny in Oregon going to learn math

He won't at public school either way, because according to Oregon, math is racist. Fortunately, the requirement to know math to graduate has been removed.

Sad thing is that the counties where it’s mostly white kids, they are definitely still learning math. In the places where they actually need it and were behind in math, this gives the teachers a way to opt out of even trying.

And in totally unrelated news, Harvard has launched a brand new remedial math course for its now incoming freshman

https://www.realcleareducation.com/2025/03/20/harvard_launches_new_remedial_math_course_1098873.html

No, Oregon just has really shitty schools because of woke ideology. It’s a rich white state with schools on par with the poor minority heavy ones.

But isn’t the problem magnified at the federal level? They too want to push off the decision to spend our money to someone else.

Why not take a chance on fifty laboratories instead of one despite both having a similar failure mode?

That's going to happen nonetheless. Point is, it's going to get worse before it gets better, if at all. And I don't have faith in American appetite for long term thinking.

and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming.

I kinda have to disagree with this and for the fundamental reason that the US is still pretty much the leading economic and military power in the world, and even through Covid we made a stronger recovery than most other nations. Clearly whatever we are doing is working pretty well. I don't know exactly what or why but we seem blessed by something.

Shaking up the etch-and-sketch to start all over is something I would employ for a shitty economy like Argentina (as Milei has rightfully done), while preferring general status quo with surgical tools for the big dogs like America. It's possible that eliminating the DOE is part of the surgery, but the lackadaisical approach so far to cutting government (the firing and then rehiring of nuclear experts or bird flu scientists, etc) and making changes (like the backlash over labeling Jackie Robinson or that military officer DEI, something easily avoidable if they just had a pair of eyes go over the list first) doesn't leave me confident about any individual decision they make.

It doesn't even seem to be a shoot first and ask questions later policy, it seems to be a "shoot first and correct the things with immediate and visible consequences or backlash" policy.

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